The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  Self-preservation was a general dumping ground to justify lying, but in some cases there was no other choice in order to stay clear of a bullet. Calvino causally mentioned over coffee with Ratana, that he’d planned to fly to New York and track down Tanny Craig and settle a little of his own unfinished business. He left the impression he was expressing his inner feelings—a man chases a woman for emotional resolution in order to find peace of mind. The very kind of self-searching that women liked to think men were as affected by as they were, unaware that men used the matter of the heart in a premeditated way as cover. Ratana would pass along the misinformation to Colonel Pratt. Instead he’d landed in Phnom Penh, where he’d applied for a Chinese tourist visa at the embassy, and caught a flight to Kunming.

  His first order of business was to follow the money Achara had donated to the temple-building project. The temple turned out to be much larger and more elaborate than he’d expected. Polished porcelain surfaces, wind chimes and gongs, a pair of large stone lions, and hand-carved doors with red dragons and brass fittings. Calvino had recognized the mane, jawlines, and eyes on the Chinese guardian lions—it was like reading a man’s signature you had seen before. Inside the temple an old monk showed him around, pointing out the photographs of clan members lining one wall. He had pointed at the faded photo of an old man with a goatee and rimless glasses and said that was Achara’s grandfather. Another ghost wall, Calvino had thought. He turned to the old monk, and the question came to him: “Did a man named Wei Zhang have any relatives in the temple?”

  The old monk, with gnarled hands and a serene smile, shifted his robes and told Calvino that Zhang had made the biggest donation to the temple, as indicated by a framed photo of an elderly Chinese man, his face wrinkled like a prune and sporting a braided pigtail flecked with gray.

  Although the other photos were covered with dust, this one was shiny and polished, and slightly larger than the others.

  It had been positioned on the wall facing the river below the temple compound. Wei Zhang’s great-grandfather, firm jaw, piercing eyes, stared into the camera. He had a nononsense look that befitted a ship’s captain, which is what the old monk told Calvino he’d been, one of the last of a generation who remembered British naval ships patrolling the river. Later this great-grandfather had kept horses and gotten into what proved to be a highly profitable business of supplying the army with horses.

  The monk, with his black teeth and a face that looked like it had gone through several lifetimes, ignored the novices hurrying past without so much as a sideward glance. The abbot shouted after one or two of them to pick up a broom and sweep the courtyard. But the young boys in their novice robes ran away, knowing that the presence of a foreign visitor would offer a temporary safety net. With some gentle nudging by Calvino, along with a cash donation stuffed in the top of an offering box—a large wooden chest with gold lettering on the outside—the old monk spoke about Wei Zhang’s great success. His empire proved how much good karma Zhang had accumulated from prior lives. It was also the result of his family lineage. No one would ever have thought that young Wei would grow up to have such large face, fortune, connections, and a footprint so long that it would stretch from China into Thailand. Like his great-grandfather, Zhang had parlayed connections inside the army—in Zhang’s case the People’s Liberation Army—to back him in business. The abbot introduced Calvino to another man, a younger Chinese, in his fifties, who said Zhang had been a weapons specialist, and he explained how Zhang had used his Communist Party membership as a passport to advance along the road to becoming a big-shot businessman. The question in Calvino’s mind was whether to trust this man who hadn’t arrived at the temple by accident—someone had sent him. Was his role to keep an eye on Calvino and report back, or was he a new breed of freelancer who’d split a commission with the abbot?

  Calvino looked him over. His haircut was a fresh military brush that gave him an official look. He wore a red polo shirt that tented over his ample stomach. He was from one of the ethnic minorities—half Tibetan and half Naxi. The kind of mix the Han Chinese viewed with suspicion. He went by his Tibetan name, Tagme. He was educated enough to know what “tag me” meant in English and told the joke on himself. Tagme agreed to act as Calvino’s interpreter. He said, in a conspiratorial whisper, that many people in Zhang’s village gossiped about in the number of Thai wives Zhang kept.

  Calvino hired him for fifty dollars a day.

  On day one, Tagme showed up wearing a green army cap, a yellow necktie, a purple shirt and black trousers. His face was puffy and round, with loose skin. The man looked totally different from the one Calvino had met at the temple. He sounded different, too.

  Tagme was fond of homespun slogans that had a vaguely Mao-like cadence. “Take care of your body, Mr. Calvino. Because you will need to use it tomorrow.” Or he would say, as he lifted his cap and scratched his balding head, “Keep your cap on and you’ll always know where to find your head.” Tagme smiled and clapped his hands together, applauding his own performance.

  Calvino had a plausible cover story for his inquiry into Zhang’s life. The price of the information inside China came at the cost of a small lie—he said that he was an American journalist doing a feature story for a financial newspaper about the rise of powerful business leaders from remote parts of China. He had taken Kincaid to lunch before leaving Thailand and arranged the cover should the Chinese ask.

  Kincaid received an official okay from an editor to use Calvino as a researcher on a Chinese business story. He also received a white envelope from Calvino. Yunnan province had filled the bill for the supposed story he had proposed: It was remote, and Zhang was a billionaire. Neither Calvino’s interpreter nor the locals had come across a reporter asking about a famous native son. But no one was particularly surprised. Zhang was someone they thought everyone in the world had heard of, more famous than Warren Buffett. Tagme introduced Calvino to an old woman, her back curved like a crossbow from a lifetime of carrying bamboo baskets filled with grass to feed livestock in the hills. Her rubbery face had gone slack, her neck sagging as she sat on the stoop in front of her simple wood-frame house. The woman had been a minor wife of Zhang’s grandfather. She remembered Zhang as a boy. He had once blamed her son for stealing money left on the table by the father. In fact Zhang had taken the money. His father believed him rather than the boy whose mother was his minor wife. Near the end of the Cultural Revolution, a cadre had dragged her boy out of the house and beaten him. They’d sent him to a re-education camp and then to the army. If he’d been older, they might have killed him like they killed many others during that time. He loved his country so much. That’s why he joined the army. She wailed how this was only one of many injustices she’d endured over her lifetime as a minor wife. She wiped tears from her old eyes as she said how the boy had been killed in a border war with Vietnam. The border was settled now, she said. Her boy had died for nothing. He had suffered, too. She unwound the scarf from her shoulders and patted her eyes, but the pouches under them continued to pool with tears.

  Zhang had escaped from the sticks, the province where Mao’s Long March had ended. His lineage included a greatgrandfather who was a supplier of horses to the army. But it was his grandfather who had the wisdom to arm Mao’s army. That wasn’t just any family foot he’d planted in the door; Zhang’s revolutionary foot could open a lucrative side door into the largest standing army in the world. All relationships that traced over a hundred years to the military would have meant nothing had his grandfather failed to see which way the wind was blowing and sold them weapons, then branched into electronics, mining, and shipping.

  Several days later, they drove to a nearby village. Tagme pulled over to the side of the road, where the land sloped down into a valley. Rice paddies ran to the north in a uniform green blanket, with snowcapped mountains in the distance under a cobalt-blue sky. Tagme rolled down his window and spit. He pointed at the rice field.

  “A full belly never rests, becaus
e tomorrow an empty belly wants rice.” He spit again, adjusted his hat, opened the door, and stepped out. He walked down the sloped embankment and stood on the edge of the field.

  “Wei Zhang’s genius was to take ordinary rice and make it extraordinary. Stronger. No chemicals.” Tagme sighed, coughed up a large glob of a thick tarry substance, which he shared with the crop. “He had a problem with the government.”

  Tagme’s mouth turned down in a frown. “So I hear.”

  Looking at the valley, Calvino could imagine the winds of gossip whipsawing from hamlet to hamlet. “What do people say?”

  Zhang had engineered rice and had fields growing the crop throughout the province. Tagme filled in a gap in the picture. There’d been a rumor that someone in the People’s Liberation Army or the Agricultural Ministry had raised doubts about the genetically altered rice. It was less a concern about the health of consumers or the environment than an attempt by Zhang’s enemies to see him reined in, if not knocked down a couple of notches. There had been inquiry, investigations, and a hearing, all conducted in back rooms. Zhang came out bruised but had defeated the men who were behind the trouble. Yet it had cost him in a number of ways. Thailand was a card he’d played to stay in the game.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE INFORMATION CALVINO unearthed in Yunnan provided an early history of how Wei Zhang’s power base had been nearly derailed. But the tracks had been laid on a solid basis from the time of his great-grandfather. Men like Zhang, like Mao, suffered setbacks, some small defeats, but after the smoke cleared, they remained standing while those who had fought to destroy them found themselves abandoned and exposed on the unprotected margins. Neither Tagme nor anyone else in the village could tell Calvino what part of Zhang’s Thai ventures he had committed to deliver to the PLA.

  Calvino had a theory. He saw Zhang looking out over a vast rice field and thinking of a way around the controversy the genetically altered rice had created. He shifted his attention to Thailand, another major rice-growing country, with a plan to redeem his vision of fast-growing rice crops.

  It remained a working theory, but one that was consistent with Brandon and Achara’s experiment in Thailand’s rice fields.

  Acquiring another company was a time-honored shortcut in business. Their Thai company already had received all of the necessary government permits. But there was another piece of the puzzle with no obvious connection to the altered rice crop—Zhang’s weapons-development program. Was the rice-growing a cover for the weapons program? Or were they equal chips placed as business bets? Only one point was clear—Thailand was a good place to develop, test, and produce both exotic rice and exotic weapons.

  Tagme shrugged off the notion that Zhang was an arms dealer. Calvino drew a picture of the Taser. Tagme patted his fat stomach, belched, and drank another beer, looking wall-eyed as he studied the drawing. He no longer bothered to dress up in his yellow necktie and purple shirt. Impressing the foreigner was no longer necessary. His eyes were unblinking as he studied the image of the weapon Calvino had sketched. Having a foreign financial journalist pump him about a weapons program was a surefire way to get Tagme a prison cell. He disappeared from sight for days.

  Calvino had looked everywhere for him. Then without any warning, Tagme showed up in his battered car, he had his dress clothes on and worked a toothpick on his upper molars.

  “I have a new customer,” he said.

  “I want you to work for me,” Calvino said.

  “I work for you and maybe I get sent to prison. Tripping over your big boots to get money means you are working for the doctor and hospital.”

  “Double your fee and no more questions about weapons.”

  Tagme noisily twisted the toothpick, then spit. “Okay, two and a half times.”

  “Deal.” And they shook hands.

  “Should have asked for three times,” said Tagme.

  There was one condition: No more open talk about electroshock weapons manufactured to kill. That was the new deal, and Calvino agreed to it. Tagme, whose inexhaustible knowledge about the history of Chinese rice, had no room for an interest in high-tech weapons.

  He replied with slogans each time Calvino tried to draw him out about Zhang’s weapons development. It made sense in a weird way: Zhang’s fortune was based largely on altering things—genetically altered rice and mechanically altered weapons. Zhang had followed in the footsteps of his ancestors in planning for the future and for their own place at the top of the pyramid.

  Tagme wrote down the names and kinship relations of the people shown in the photos, which included Wei Zhang. Calvino asked Tagme to also write down the names of Zhang’s school, his neighborhood, his childhood friends, his mother and father, aunts and uncles, classmates.

  “Working for you reminds me of the Cultural Revolution,” said Tagme.

  “Keep writing,” said Calvino.

  Tagme looked up from the page, set down the pen, and lit a cigarette. “Then what?”

  “We find the people.”

  Tagme guided Calvino through a game of house-to-house search. It took them a week to cover several villages, tracking down Zhang’s family and friends, looking at old family photo albums—the ones that had been hidden during the purges of the 1970s. Zhang at eight years old, all teeth and snub nose, looking at the camera, was recognizable from the way he tilted his head to one side. Zhang at twelve, seventeen, and in his early twenties, filling out, more confident, hands on his hips, stared down the photographer. Every man had secrets. The more Calvino talked with people from Zhang’s village, the more he felt they clammed up once he started to probe into Zhang’s childhood. Then one morning an old woman he’d seen a couple of times before waved him over. She chewed a wad of tobacco and spit a foot ahead in the dirt.

  “Find a Naxi called Tsier Qidgu and ask her. She knows a thing or two.” Tagme had whispered that the old woman was half mad, and the other half wasn’t all that sane.

  Something about the direct, focused look in her eyes, though, told Calvino that he should listen. “I want you to find this woman,” he said to Tagme, who lifted his cap and scratched his head before carrying on a fifteen-minute conversation in Chinese about Tsier Qidgu. Afterward he slapped his thigh, sucked his teeth, and did about every gesture possible to relay his feeling that this was a wild-goose chase.

  “Ask Tsier Qidgu about Chou.” That was what the old woman had told Tagme. She’d laughed, shaken her head, and stuck another plug of tobacco between her teeth and cheek.

  Doubt—and fear—registered in Tagme’s eyes. Truth, doubt, and anger showed in the eyes; there was no place for the eyes to hide those feelings.

  In a chicken-scratching, flyblown Naxi village cupped like a fist inside Yulong, the name of the snowy mountains, located about thirty miles outside of Lijiang, Calvino found the house of the old woman named Tsier Qidgu. Her house was built from stone and soil; the courtyard was paved with cobblestones and blue and white tiles. She sat on a small bench, waiting for Calvino’s arrival, as advance word had preceded him. For the occasion she’d dressed in a sleeveless black jacket over a blue blouse, a pleated skirt, and a black turban. She ate corn from a cob, looking up as Calvino entered the courtyard. Her weathered, lined face revealed a smile and the absence of several teeth, aging her another twenty years. She looked as old as the mountains framed behind her small compound. Tagme said the old woman lived in a good Naxi village. The bad villages were inhabited by evil men and were to be avoided even by other Naxis.

  Tagme sucked his teeth and said that the Naxis could never keep a secret. And they believed in the old superstitions, and no one took them seriously in modern China. He admitted that the Naxi women were tall, strong as oxen, and good workers. But that was offset, in his mind, by the fact that they couldn’t think straight or keep their thoughts straight, spending their lives supporting lazy men who lay around all day and played musical instruments and drank all night.

  “Tell me about Chou,” said Calvino through Tagme. />
  She fidgeted, tented her fingers, pouted, and slowly sighed.

  “What’s Chou’s connection to Zhang?” Calvino nodded.

  He showed her three one-hundred-dollar bills and folded them into her hand, then balled her hand into a fist. She squeezed the notes even as Calvino removed his hand from hers.

  “I can only report what I saw,” she said. She swore that she’d never told another person for fear of the threat issued by Zhang’s father that he would kill everyone in her village if she opened her mouth. The old man was long dead. The son was no longer in the region. No one cared much about such matters in modern times. She clutched the green notes in her hand as if they represented modern times.

  She eyed Calvino, not saying anything. “Okay, we have tea first. Then we talk.”

  After small talk, Tsier Qidgu wiped her mouth and hands. Tagme translated.

  Forty-five years ago, Tsier Qidgu had assisted the village midwife at Zhang’s birth. She’d been young at the time. But she remembered the event clearly. Zhang hadn’t been launched into the world alone. She smiled and fell silent.

  Calvino pressed Tagme to find out what the old woman meant. Zhang was the eldest son. But he was the eldest by default; his elder brother had been born dead. She had witnessed the face of his stillborn twin, eyes squeezed tight, a grim, sorrowful expression crossing the tiny lips, the fist a dull blue. The sexual organs had been only partially developed, but the child was recorded as a male. Zhang’s twin came out first. The physical anomalies of the dead twin, and indeed the very existence of the dead baby, had been kept as a family secret. But in a village, secrets were difficult to keep. The midwife and her assistant, Tsier Qidgu, had witnessed the birth. Zhang’s father paid both to seal their lips. The seal broke over time. Tsier Qidgu spoke to her sister about what had happened, making her swear never to repeat the story on pain of calling out the spirit of the dead twin. The chain didn’t stop with the sister. Achara also had found out about Zhang’s unusual birth. The midwife was his aunt. Tsier Qidgu said that the dead brother had haunted Zhang’s life.